Lebanon

Throughout history, men braved the odds to perform great feats. Outmatched generals snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Titans of industry gambled on bold innovations to reap jackpots. Athletes tested the limits of human endurance in quests for glory. Riad Toufic Salame, the governor of Lebanon's central bank, is not one of those men. Instead, the silver-haired banker became a hero by playing it very, very safe.

His hand adorned with silver rings, the self-proclaimed emperor of Nowheristan struck his slim iron cane firmly on the table, quieting a group of twentysomething Lebanese gathered around him. "All great projects in history started this way," he said, casting a piercing look at his audience while toying with his cane. "Any new, extravagant idea is always considered at first a hallucination."

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said Saturday that his guerrilla organization had the remains of Israeli soldiers left on southern Lebanon's battlefields during a 34-day war that started after the group captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. "Oh Zionists, your army is lying to you. . . . Your army has left the body parts of your soldiers in our villages and fields," Nasrallah said in a rare public appearance. "I am not talking about regular body parts.

The young man had been through a miserable few years. He had been rejected by the army and failed to finish his studies. Security officials kept summoning him for talks. At 25, he left his parents' home in the city, telling them he wanted to be a shepherd. They heard nothing more from him until newspapers reported that he was wanted in Germany for involvement in a plot to bomb a pair of trains.

A powerful car bomb Friday in a suburb of the Lebanese capital killed a key investigator of a string of previous assassinations and Al Qaeda-linked groups said to be fomenting political violence in this shaky country. Inspector Wissam Eid, a ranking intelligence official in the Internal Security Forces, and his aide were killed by the explosion in an intersection in a mostly Christian area east of Beirut. At least two other civilians died and 41 were wounded, security and medical officials said.

President Bush on Saturday bemoaned the latest assassination of a Lebanese official and told Syria and Iran to "end their interference" in their neighbor's affairs. Investigators tried to determine whether the killing was tied to past attacks against anti-Syrian politicians in Lebanon. "We demand that Syria, Iran and their allies end their interference in and obstruction of Lebanon's political process," Bush said in a statement.

Beirut Forget getting behind on your payments. Maysa, a 31-year-old accountant, is making payments on her behind. For years the Beirut resident felt uncomfortable with her derriere. She tried dieting, exercise and weight-loss pills, to no avail. Then she discovered that her bank was offering thousands of dollars in loans for nose jobs, breast implants, face-lifts and liposuction.

An official panel of inquiry found Wednesday that Israel's failure to win the 2006 war in Lebanon stemmed from "flawed conduct" and "serious failings" by its political and military leadership, but concluded that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acted in what he thought was the country's best interest. The final report on the panel's 16-month investigation casts no personal blame on any leader. Critics of the embattled prime minister said that made it less likely he would soon be forced to resign.

In a rare internal critique of Israel's use of cluster bombs, a government-appointed commission has found a lack of "operational discipline, control and oversight" in the army's deployment of the weapons in civilian areas. The panel's statement, buried in an exhaustive report on Israel's conduct of the 2006 Lebanon war, did not directly challenge the army's assertion that its use of cluster bombs in that conflict fell within the bounds of international humanitarian law.

The ayatollah has a simple piece of advice for any Muslim woman being abused by her husband: Hit him back. "A woman can respond to physical violence inflicted on her by a man with counter- violence as a self-defense measure," Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's senior-most Shiite cleric, wrote in a fatwa late last year that shocked conservative Muslims around the world. Fadlallah long has been considered a leader of the most radical faction of Shiite Muslims in Lebanon.